Democrats Impotent to Stop War

Posted by ZZ Bachman...

(WASHINGTON) Frustrated by the lack of political progress in Iraq, under pressure by antiwar groups and mindful of polls showing that most Americans want the war to end, the Democrats last week put forward a $50 billion war spending bill with strings attached knowing it would fail.

Like so many of the war-related measures that Democrats have proposed this year, the spending bill sought to set a timeline for redeploying American troops, and to narrow the mission to focus on counterterrorism and on the training of Iraq’s security forces.

And, like so many of the war-related measures that Democrats proposed this year, it was approved in the House only to wither and die in the Senate, where on Friday it fell 7 votes short of the 60 needed to prevent a Republican filibuster — with 45 senators voting to block the measure.

All signs indicate that Democrats will continue proposing such measures as long as Mr. Bush remains in office and troops remain in Iraq. “We are going to keep plugging away,” said Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, chairman of the Armed Services Committee.

Democratic lawmakers and strategists on Capitol Hill said their hope was that even if Republican support for Mr. Bush’s strategy held firm, voters would reward Democrats for their efforts at the polls next November, and that there was no risk to failing again and again… — New York Times

However…. this is not necessarily a universal perception and it’s also one big assumption that voters would reward Democrats for banging their heads against a wall, trying to pound a square peg into a round hole, placing their impotence on display month after month. Afterall everyone loves a winner and wants to be a winner, and if as it appears, that in fact the surge is working it is close enough to a victory for many Americans who remember the failures and disgrace under the Carter Administration…

Senator John Ensign, Republican of Nevada, echoed his party’s contention that Congress should not interfere with the making of progress in Iraq. “The American people, I think, would rather have General Petraeus running the war than members of Congress,” he said, referring to Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top commander in Iraq. “He has proven his strategy is working.”
But Mr. Murtha, one of the most respected voices on military affairs, said Democrats would not relent in their effort to pull out the troops.

“For two years I have publicly fought for the redeployment of our troops from Iraq,” he said. “Congressional Democrats will not stop championing the will of the American people until our troops come home.”

Murtha shows true signs of black and blue marks on his head as he continues to be hell bent on depleting troop strength, thus playing into the hands of the insurgents. All to force a partisan political point at the expense of stability in Iraq. This is a dangerous political path for Democrats to be taking and may backfire, especially in the face of the following news… reported by the New York Times no less…

Data released at a news conference in Baghdad showed that attacks had declined to the lowest level since January 2006. It is the third week in a row that attacks have been at this reduced level.
The statistics on attack trends have long been a standard measure that the American military has used to assess violence in Iraq. Because the data have been gathered for years and are deemed generally reliable they allow analysts to identify trends.

Military officials said that the attacks were directed against American and Iraqi forces, as well as civilians. But since the source for the data on attack trends is American military reports, and not the Iraqi government, the figures do not provide an exhaustive measure of sectarian violence.

Nonetheless, the figures added to a body of evidence, compiled by American and Iraqi officials, indicating that the violence had diminished significantly since the United States reinforced troop levels in Iraq and adopted a new counterinsurgency strategy…

…“These trends are stunning in military terms and beyond the predictions of most proponents of the surge last winter,” said Michael O’Hanlon, a military analyst at the Brookings Institution. “Nobody knows if the trends are durable in the absence of national reconciliation and in the face of major U.S. troop drawdowns in 2008.” – NYT / Brookings Institute.